George Shultz

Biography

George Shultz was born in New York City in 1920 and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He graduated in economics from Princeton in 1942 and served as a Marine Corps artillery officer in the Pacific during the Second World War. He earned a PhD in industrial economics at MIT in 1949, taught there from 1948 to 1957, with a stint on Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers, and then joined the University of Chicago's business school, which he led as dean from 1962 to 1968.

Under Richard Nixon he was Secretary of Labor from 1969, imposing the Philadelphia Plan that required construction unions to admit Black workers, then the first director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1970 and Secretary of the Treasury from 1972 to 1974, when the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates was finally abandoned. He spent the next eight years at the engineering company Bechtel, rising to president.

Ronald Reagan made him Secretary of State in July 1982 after Alexander Haig resigned, and he held the office until January 1989. He settled a quarrel with European allies over sanctions on a Soviet gas pipeline, urged Reagan to build a personal dialogue with Mikhail Gorbachev, which prepared the way for the 1987 treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces, and opposed the arms-for-hostages dealings that became the Iran-Contra affair. By the end of 1988 he had opened a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

After leaving office he taught at Stanford, advised George W. Bush, and campaigned for nuclear disarmament and a revenue-neutral carbon tax. From 2011 to 2015 he sat on the board of Theranos, whose fraudulent blood tests his grandson Tyler helped expose. He died in 2021 at the age of 100.